


the drowning plea

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-28 18:51:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11423994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: It isn’t that large of a price to pay, really. Not really. Not for everything she has gotten in exchange. What’s a little bit of lying?





	the drowning plea

**Author's Note:**

> I know this probably isn’t why soft Rachel exists -- but if the show gives us a month of Rachel scenes without even trying to explain why she’s doing the things she does, it loses its right to Rachel and her potential motivations. This is my city now.
> 
> [warnings: blood, violence]

Westmorland pours Rachel a glass of port, taps the edge of his glass against hers. The warmth of the alcohol spreads through her belly, and along with it: the warmth of P.T. Westmorland, looking at Rachel, telling her _it was always supposed to be you_ and _I’ve been watching your progress for years, you’re admirable, you’re more impressive than anything I’ve seen in quite some time_ and _I’ve chosen you_ and again, again, _it was always supposed to be you_.

The glass drains. Rachel is high and heady with it, the top of the mountain, the seat carved out there for her. Sarah staggering out there in the dark, bleeding from Rachel’s wound – and here Rachel is, that fact held under her tongue with the wine. Everything she wanted: the power and the release. How good it had felt to—

Westmorland puts his glass down. He leans forward. He says: _this whole conflict with Sarah is…beneath you. You understand that, don’t you?_

Rachel blinks, rapidly, caught off-guard despite herself. It’s only: she hadn’t mentioned Sarah at all. There is no reason for Sarah to be on Westmorland’s mind; the last time Rachel and Sarah had been in contact was when Rachel had been working with her, just when communication had gone out on the island. That moment in the basement is _hers_ , and—

And Rachel remembers her eye.

She keeps her breathing steady. She keeps the smile on her face. Stupid. Naive. _Naive_ , to assume that it might not go both ways. She saw everything Westmorland wanted her to see and she didn’t even consider that _he_ might see everything he wanted, too.

Rachel drinks more port. She murmurs assurances: of course Sarah is beneath her, she knows better now, it was a momentary lapse – this is all she’d ever wanted, after all. As if she’d give it up for that brief sharp thrill of someone else’s pain.

It’s all she’d ever wanted. This. This seat, this glass of port, this latest man in an exhausting line of men looking at her and finally – _finally_ – seeing some sort of worth in her. And she does. She wants it. The eye itches in its socket but that’s psychosomatic, that’s not real; she’ll consider it later, when she’s alone.

Oh. No. She’s not going to be alone, is she.

Rachel’s stomach rolls and she dreams this brand-new dream of the knife. She swallows more port, but it’s too late: the warmth inside of her has gone out.

* * *

It’s just another game. Just another lie. Rachel used to live under security cameras and now one lives inside of her. Rachel used to be watched most of the time and now she is watched all of the time. Rachel used to be almost perfect at concealing her emotions and now she’ll be perfect at it, that’s all. She’ll be absolutely perfect. It’s not as if she has any other choice. She’s impressed with Westmorland, despite herself: he has built the perfect panopticon. Rachel will never, ever be alone.

* * *

She can’t even practice in the mirror, but that’s fine. She goes to bed, closes her eyes, and under the covers bites down hard on her knucklebones. Anger makes her whole body shake. Rachel keeps her eyes (only one of them matters, but) screwed tightly shut and bites down, harder and harder, until the skin breaks and her mouth turns metal with blood. It’s not enough.

She is terrified that she’ll make a sound. She is terrified that the eye might be capable of picking up sound, even a small sound, even the hitch of her breathing. When that breathing has calmed she pulls her hand out of her mouth, licks the blood from her knuckles by feeling alone.

Then, with her whole mouth like a stripped wire and with her eyes so tightly closed: she practices it. She smiles to no one. She mouths words – the words themselves don’t matter, just the comfort. The ease. The love. _Things are different now. I believe in him. Everything can be easy. Please trust me. Things are different now. I am different now. Westmorland wants you—_

( _Sarah,_ he had said, _Cosima, Helena, these girls are valuable, you know this, we can’t afford to burn our bridges with them for the sake of old grudges—_

—and Rachel wanted it, more than anything—

—no, Rachel didn’t want it, Rachel wants _this_ more than anything, it’s all she’d ever wanted—

—and she had tried out her smile for the first time and said _of course, I want to work with them too._ Just a momentary lapse. It was a momentary lapse, Percival. Mister Westmorland. Whatever you’d like. I’m better now. Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.)

— _and I want you, too. Not like that, Sarah, I promise. I never think about it at all. It was a slip. It was an accident. I was so angry. Believe me. Please believe me. I am different now. Please._

When the words stop tasting like blood, she stops practicing them. She taps her thumb against the bite mark on her hand, rubs the pad of it back and forth over the ridges of her teeth. She keeps her breathing so steady. Her body aches.

The basement reassembles itself in Rachel’s brain. Here is the blood splatter on the floor. Here is Susan, sitting in her chair. Here is Sarah standing over her. Here is Rachel in the doorway behind her, with her cane up, already swinging.

The moment freezes. Rachel feels the pull of her muscles, the weight of the cane, the momentum, the anger burning bright and hot in her chest like a blinding light. She keeps her breathing steady. She wipes hot salt water off her cheeks, but doesn’t open her eyes to see if her vision is blurred.

* * *

Cosima is on the ground with a needle (weak, useless) and Rachel does not slip.

Sarah knocks the teacup onto the ground, sneers trite and childish trash from between her teeth—

—Sarah is fearless, Sarah sees Rachel as a chained dog, Sarah can dance as close as she likes because of that leash, Sarah dances, Sarah _knows_ —

—it would just be one more slip—

—but Westmorland wants Kira, and Kira comes through Sarah, and if she lunges it’ll just pull her choke-chain; the eye hums against Rachel’s skull, a tremble of a vibration, it doesn’t lubricate when she blinks, it doesn’t stop looking forward—

—at the mess of cuts on Sarah’s face where Rachel has already (Westmorland says) gone too far—

—and the teacup shatters on the floor, and Rachel does not slip.

Alison brings Rachel her father’s head in a bag, and Rachel does not slip. She doesn’t. One snarled threat does not make a slip, she’s fine, she’s different now, she’s better, the report came in that Alison is leaving for Florida, this does not matter. The velvet glove chafes on Rachel’s hand and she keeps wearing it. When she sees Westmorland he smiles, and toasts her _well done_.

* * *

In the basement Rachel breaks Sarah’s fingers,

In the basement Rachel breaks Sarah’s fingers,

In the basement Rachel breaks Sarah’s fingers,

and the helicopter lands. Rachel’s mouth does not taste like blood. She steps off the helicopter. She gives pretty speeches. She steps on the helicopter.

In the basement the knife goes in,

Rachel tells Ferdinand she has found her purpose.

In the basement the knife goes in,

Rachel tells Sarah that she has found her purpose.

In the basement the knife goes in,

Rachel tells anyone who will listen that she has found her purpose, that this is it, that this is the thing she has always wanted. And she’s gotten it. She has always wanted to be soft. She has always wanted an end to this war – she got caught up in it, that’s all. She knows better now. What a shame, that it took her this long. Smile big. Smile bigger. Keep smiling.

and Sarah rolls onto her side, mouth ripped open in a scream, eyes screwed tight shut. Blood gumming down her face. The sound – sharpest sound Rachel has ever heard. _Aaa-_ ah. On and on it goes. Rachel rewinds. In the basement the knife goes in, and Sarah rolls onto her side, mouth ripped open in a scream, eyes screwed tight shut.

Keep smiling.

, eyes screwed tight shut.

Keep smiling.

Rachel closes her eyes and Sarah’s eyes open, weeping and terrified. Rachel rewinds the memory back to the start. She steps forward and swings, over and over again.

* * *

It isn’t that large of a price to pay, really. Not really. Not for everything she has gotten in exchange. What’s a little bit of lying?

* * *

She puts on her lipstick in the mirror. She cannot say it out loud but she thinks it. It isn’t that much to pay. She’s been lying her whole life. What’s a little bit more?

She leans in close to the mirror and rakes her eyes up and down her face, hates the way it feels like an invasion.

* * *

Rachel slides a different tape into the player. Rachel rewinds it.

Westmorland is drinking port, and Rachel can’t help but hate him. Just a little bit. He waxes rhapsodic about tortoises, points to a photograph in a frame on the wall that Rachel makes herself pay close attention to. She is weighing Westmorland in the scales of her mind. To underestimate him would be stupid – ruinously stupid. A daft old man who talks about tortoises, only he’s the one who cut off a swan’s head and set it down by Rachel’s knifeblock. He worked with Rachel’s mother until he got bored of her, and then he sent Rachel in to clean up his mess.

Rachel isn’t stupid. Westmorland hasn’t talked about birds of prey, or mammals – and yet the bones and bodies of these animals line the room. He must have been interested in them, once. They’re dead now. Rachel is alive, and Westmorland is eyeing her teasingly over the rim of his glass. He smiles. Instinct: she smiles back. It pulls at her lips but that’s fine, it’s a game, she can play it.

Westmorland puts his glass down. He leans forward. He says: _this whole conflict with Sarah is…beneath you. You understand that, don’t you?_

Rachel rewinds.

Westmorland is talking about tortoises again – and Conan Doyle, who used to be his friend. Conan Doyle, who isn’t anymore. Rachel isn’t stupid. Rachel cannot afford to be stupid.

She could play this memory another way, if she wanted to. She could change it into a daydream. She could throw her wine glass into Westmorland’s face, or scream, or snarl. She could do anything.

But every time she lets the scene play out, and she keeps smiling.

* * *

She paints her lipstick on, bright red. She smiles at Sarah.

She paints her lipstick on, soft pink. She smiles at Ferdinand.

She scatters colors over the top of her vanity and keeps scrubbing off her mouth and painting it on, over and over again. What will make her smile into something other people believe? The belief is the only thing Westmorland will see – their faces, not her own. What is the right color, the right smile, the right mouth that will make the right words? What does she have to do to keep herself here at the top of the world?

* * *

In the car with Ferdinand. Rachel hasn’t been fully cognizant for hours; the patch of blood on Sarah’s leg is its own dark sea, and she lets herself sink beneath the surface of it. _I was raised for this_ , she says, over and over, without a mouth. _This is mine. My time._ Her soft pink mouth says things to Ferdinand like _Westmorland made me whole_ and _I don’t want to hit you_ and other partial truths. Sarah screams loud enough to drown it all out. Rachel hopes Westmorland is happy with the way things are proceeding, because then at least one of them will be happy.

Ferdinand has been shooting her petulant little glares for the entire car ride, and she can tell he wants to say it: _how can you believe in him_ , and _what happened to you_. He doesn’t say it. If he said it Rachel would say something back that would be glossy as the top of the water, smooth and meaningless. She doesn’t know who Ferdinand talks to, and if those people might talk to Westmorland. She doesn’t know, still, if the eye carries sound. She doesn’t even know the name of the man driving this car. Blind spots, if you’d like to be petty about it.

When Rachel was seventeen she fucked Ferdinand in front of a security camera and thought that’s what it meant to be bold. She tried it again, earlier this afternoon – she touched Ferdinand, she kept her eyes wide open the entire time. She doesn’t feel bold anymore. But she was younger then.

She wonders if that was Westmorland’s plan too. Lately it seems like everything is. She’s so tired. Everything in her life belongs to him: her parents, Aldous, her time at DYAD, her eye, her body, the words that fall out of her mouth. She is going to collect Kira from school, and this is Westmorland’s plan. If Westmorland says to drop Ferdinand Rachel will leave him behind, because she won’t need him anymore, because she is better and she has changed and she’s so happy, so happy now that she is finally fulfilled.

Outside the scenery of Toronto streams by. _Rachel Duncan, stop,_ her mother groans from the floor.

 _I wish I could_ , Rachel starts to think, and then she drops the thought before it can get dangerous. This is everything she’s ever wanted. She says nothing. She twists her hands on her cane, here in the back of the car, and down in the basement she turns around. A smile pulls at the corners of her mouth. She was so certain, then, that she owned herself.

* * *

Kira stares at Rachel as they drive away from the house – apparently a trend, when Rachel is in the backseat with someone else. Rachel looks right back, to let the eye drink in all the details. She feels the slight, painful tug as it focuses to headache-inducing sharpness. She smiles to mask it.

Kira’s brow furrows and she looks at Rachel searchingly, her two good eyes sweeping like spotlights. “Are you okay?” she says.

The word _no_ plunges through Rachel’s throat like a cannonball and she is on the floor and Susan is screaming and Rachel wraps her hand around the knife and every single piece of the world goes clear and easy and beautiful.

“Are you?” she says gently, and the machine clicks back into motion. _It’s been a long day, hasn’t it_ , and _were the two of you close?_ and _I do hope we can be of some help to you, Kira,_ and she’s missed it. Her chance. Her one chance to say something true. It falls down, all the way down.

In the basement Rachel doesn’t look up, not once. She grins down at Sarah, smiling like a knife she hasn’t let go of yet, and she doesn’t turn her head to see the weight of her world falling down on her.

**Author's Note:**

> Something in the dirt is looking up at me  
> I’ve got enough to hide, I need the space to breathe  
> Need to break in my heart, let my emotions free  
> Need to bathe my mind without the drowning plea  
> Gotta get away, gotta get get away  
> \--"Into the Dark," Khai
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! Save a life, leave a comment. \o/


End file.
